A simple four-hash like BSD or Gentoo Linux do with their repository is more than sufficient.
No need to record who is requesting the recording, much leas fetchibg.
A blockchain is, at its core, a distributed database, it is exactly made for this use case.
These same limitations amplifies when going to outer scopes like URL itself, blockchain isn't immune to this.
Blockchain also has the same problem when attempting to track/verify each single vote.
W3C Subresource Integrity Recommendation
Source: https://www.w3.org/TR/sri-2/
> What's the point of having Wikipedia reference a URL + hash if the page does not exist anymore?
It would be way cheaper for Wikipedia to run a durable archive service themselves than to use the blockchain as an archive.
Doing that with a blockchain like tech is one of the few use cases where the tech itself actually adds value.
Heck you might be able to store the entire pages on a blockchain or a blockchain linked storage.
The problem with these sites is that we implicitly trust them and unlike a book or other handprint media where editing or destroying all unedited existing copies is effectively impossible if a shady actor can easily start editing archived news articles and other sites that are no longer publicly available.
If Wikipedia recorded the hash of every referenced page you could verify that the archive.is page is unchanged.
You could certainly argue that archive.is isn’t the right place to store archives (I have no idea) but attempting to move all this to the blockchain would be very expensive.
If you download an ISO for a Linux OS for example, they give you the hash of the file so you can check it. They don't build an entire blockchain whatever to validate the hash.
